Here’s an article about a city of 32 million that you’ve probably never heard of. The city is emblematic of China—dynamic, thriving, and almost completely unfamiliar to Westerners. From Guy Mettan at thefloutist.substack.com:
The West’s ‘wall of ognorance.’
Chongqing nightscape. (Jay Huang, cc by 2.0. / Wikimedia Commons.)
Guy Mettan, the prominent Swiss journalist, returns to The Floutist’s pages with this very fine piece on Chongqing, written after a recent visit. We like it for its exploration of China’s aspirations as these are manifest in advanced technologies and their applications. In this it is a reminder of how, obsessed as we are with China as a malevolent, globally ambitious menace, we are blinded to the nation as it is. More than this, Guy gives us a close-in view of a phenomenon that is evident to one or another degree across East Asia. This is the rediscovery among Asians of their Asianness—a salutary self-centeredness in the best meaning of this term. To modernize, at long last, no longer means to Westernize: This is a turn in consciousness of world-historical significance, in our view. Guy Mettan shows us what it looks like.
We offer this wonderful piece as a weekend reader.
—The Editors.
Guy Mettan.
4 JULY—If the reign of quantity inspires you, then Chongqing will delight you. It is the city of excess and superlatives. Two and a half millennia old, the largest city in China, the largest city in the world by area, by population equal to Austria (with 32 million permanent residents), with 2,200 office and residential towers, it is also the world’s leading industrial metropolis: It manufactures, among other things, 30 percent of the planet’s laptops, countless smartphone components, a third of the world’s motorcycles, and an eighth of Chinese cars. Its growth rate has surpassed that of the Guangzhou–Shenzhen region. Chongqing’s importance now places it among the four cities that, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tientsin, are directly under the central government.
Located in a mountainous region of southwest China, on the banks of the Yangtze River, it bears witness to the economic takeoff of the provinces close to the country’s historic heartland, Szechuan. It owes its growth to the logistics routes it has created to open up its land: on the one hand a north-south axis to Xian–Beijing and Guangzhou and on the other an east-west axis to the ports on the Pacific coast, and the new Silk Road routes leading to Russia and Europe through Central Asia.
And yet, who outside Asia has heard of Chongqing (but for its place in some old films, perhaps, when it was “Chungking”), and who knows how to locate it on a map? Virtually no one. This wall of ignorance is emblematic of the gap separating the West from China and causes us to misunderstand the scope of China’s progress and the size of its real economy. We act toward it like Minister Bruno Lemaire, who predicted the collapse of the Russian economy on 25 February 2022, the day after Russian forces intervened in Ukraine. Obsessed by our moral biases, our growing Sinophobia, and our sense of superiority, we judge, condemn, and blame without bothering to learn.
Dayam Average Intelligence says it is the size of Austria if you count metro and suburbs.
Even it says that the city flies under the radar.
I loved the old Chunking for your beautiful body commercial as a lil’ shaver!